The science of sexual harassment

The harassment scandals are designed to prop up the myth
that men and women are the same

hese days it seems that only true misogynists—not the imaginary ones that feminists
talk about, but the ones who wouldn't touch a woman with a ten foot pole—are safe.

The accusations we're hearing depict actions and attitudes that are almost unimaginably
crude. They show us that those institutions that have been lecturing us are a swamp
of hypocrisy. But what does it mean? Why now? Is it an attempt by
feminists to clamber back to the top of the victim hierarchy? A feeding frenzy for
ambulance chasers? A breakup of leftist mythology? Or just another fad, like tearing
down statues and wearing silly pink hats?

Maybe, as Angelo Codevilla
says,
it's an attempt to revitalize political correctness:

[S]omething was needed to show that the whole P.C. montage is something other
than what it is—and that America should stand with the ruling class in
defense of basic decency. We needed a good panic. So here it is.

I think it's something more fundamental: Nature is reminding
us that women are different from men. Many men, if propositioned by a female
boss, would rejoice at the unexpected employ­ment benefits. This isn't cultural, but
genetic; there are sound biological reasons why the two sexes have different
reproductive strategies. For the male, reproduction is cheap. For the female, it
is expensive. Males are stronger and take bigger risks. Unless prevented from
doing so, men will protect women.

It is difficult for a female to sexually harass a male, let alone rape one,
despite what the newspapers say. Women's power over men is mostly negative: it is
exercised by rejecting them (and by wearing out their auditory cortex). But admitting
that would be to admit that these differences are built into our genes.

As much as people deny it, this asymmetry is caused by biology, not by power.
Therefore, no matter how much power women manage to wrangle out of the government,
and no matter how much they smash the “patriarchy,” the inequality will
remain.

The sexualization of entertainment and the ubiquity of porn are not the cause of
it. These are nature's attempts to restore what is being lost, much as food industries
pack their nutrient-challenged food with sugar and salt in an attempt to make it palatable.

Feminists ended chivalry and killed off the concepts of ‘ladies’ and
‘gentlemen.’ We're taught to slam doors in their faces—what the
Chinese call “letting them eat closed-door soup”—and to treat them
like guys, and now people are surprised at the results. Weren't the past fifty years
of cultural sleaze supposed to have taught us that women are just as lustful, sleazy,
and crude as the typical Hollywood producer? If that were so, they could not be
harassed. Women are either just like guys or they're not.

Most men want to treat women as equals. But the terms of how that's done need to take
their inherent differences into account. Pretending there are none, physically or
psychologically, leads to technological solutions to fill the roles that women are
abandoning: sexbots for companionship, and soon artificial incubators to take over
women's reproductive duties. It also leads to legal solutions to suppress the problems
that arise from denying biological reality.

As tempting as it is to conclude that chivalry and mutual respect are resurfacing,
it seems more likely that these scandals are one last effort to build a
quasi-legal system to prop up the myth that men and
women are functionally interchangeable.

We tend to think of moments like this as points of primary cultural change,
but in fact the sexual revolution was purely technical: the birth control pill
irrevocably divorced sex from reproduction. To paraphrase Breitbart, culture is
downstream from technology.

Before the Pill, premarital sex was considered immoral. And for good reason:
premarital sex—and this might shock some readers—could lead to
pregnancy and childbirth, which was, at one time in our distant, barbaric
past, considered a big deal.

Those who lived through that era know it bore little resemblance to the way it's
portrayed today. Those attitudes were rational adaptations to the technology
of the times. In the frenzy of women wanting to compete equally with men, maybe it's
dawning on feminists that they gave up more than they gained. It is a price
they willingly paid. And deep down, maybe that's what this is all about: buyer's
remorse.

The idea that leftist mythology is shipwrecked might sound appealing, but this
isn't it. People are strongly invested in the mythology. They won't give it up
easily.